Fasteners are often used in conjunction with caps, often plastic, when securing sheet-like materials such as roofing felt or plastic building wrap. Caps, such as plastic discs, often are circular or oval and somewhat concave on the side contacting the sheet-like material, may be used with staples or nails driven manually as with a conventional hammer, or via some type of staple or nail gun. Staple or nail guns may be powered by electricity or air pressure, or may operate using a manually applied force. The manually applied force can be the force of a striking action, such as with so-called “slaphammers” as are known in the art.
In the simplest application, caps may be placed beneath a fastener prior to manually driving a manually-placed fastener through the cap to secure sheet-like materials. One advance over this simplest method has been to supply fasteners, e.g. nails, with the fastener already inserted through a cap piece. Further, systems have been developed for feeding caps from a reservoir or magazine into position in a power-driven apparatus, such that the fasteners are driven through the automatically positioned caps upon activation of the device. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,145,725 and 5,947,362 to Omli, the disclosures of which are hereby fully incorporated herein by reference.
Although some systems include a supply of caps that purport to feed into position in a manually actuated fastener driver, many limitations are characteristic of current devices. Accordingly, a need persists for a manually actuated fastener driver having a reservoir of caps and which automatically positions such caps for co-application with a fastener.